Gigaom Shuts Down in Crowded Tech Media Landscape

When tech blog Gigaom announced Monday that it was unable to pay its creditors and would shut down, the media world reacted mostly with shock.

Not only was Gigaom posting as recently as that afternoon -- about the Apple Watch event -- but the site also didn't appear to be all that cash-strapped. Its most recent funding round last year raised $8 million, at which point the site's founder Om Malik gave up his day-to-day role. The site had ramped up efforts to find new revenue streams, such as an events business and research arm.

Clearly, though, something went wrong. "We do not know at this time what the lenders intend to do with the assets or if there will be any future operations using those assets," Gigaom management wrote in a statement. "The company does not currently intend to file bankruptcy."

Gigaom's fate had others in the digital media industry wondering if the event portended a larger "content shakeout," especially given that Say Media recently sold its own tech site ReadWrite.

Executives in the media and venture capital worlds say it is quite difficult to be a self-sustaining site these days, considering the crowded tech media space.

"When everybody from The Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to everybody else has doubled down on covering tech, what's your value?" said Rafat Ali, the CEO and founder of travel site Skift. Mr. Ali sat on an advisory board to Gigaom after the site he founded, paidContent, was acquired by the company (though he says they never asked him for advice).

Mr. Ali said that Gigaom likely raised too much money for a company that was unlikely to drive the kind of audience hyper-growth of a BuzzFeed or Vox Media.

The site has long done a good job covering specialized areas, from clean tech to enterprise businesses, but getting a large audience and keeping up with the competition proved difficult.

The traffic figures speak to this. Gigaom received about 2 million unique visitors in January, down 10% from the year-earlier period, according to comScore. Over the same time period, competitors like Mashable, TechCrunch and Business Insider have drawn in almost 50% more unique visitors, comScore says.